Carol Berg's Lighthouse Duet

August 5, 2013

At some point earlier this year, Carol Berg announced that she was finishing up Dust and Light, the opening novel in her Sanctuary Duet.  You would have to understand how deeply and immensely I LOVED the Lighthouse Duet, the original two books set in Navronne, in order to understand with how much giddy glee I danced at the news that there would be two more books set in that world.

And so, in preparation for the upcoming release of Dust and Light, I have decided to re-read the Lighthouse Duet as it has been a few years since I turned the pages in either tome.

As part of the preparation for going back and re-reading, I've been looking at some of the reviews at the time the books were released and it's fascinating to me that the emotional resonance that these two novels had for me, has little, if anything, to do with what the reviews highlighted.  Reviewers spoke about the books as a "coming-of-age" adventure and about "a troubled world full of politics, anarchy and dark magic."

While both those reviews are 'true' in a surface sense, for me, the books went much deeper than just a generic boy comes of age fantasy tale.  The novels were about the bones of civilization, about the threads that bind and what happens when they start to fray.  The works spoke deeply to me about the nature of memory and, in the process of determining what should be preserved about a civilization, what it tells us about who we are, and our place and time in the river of history.


I am reminding myself that as my spiritual home, my roots are in history, literature, and archeology so those themes would have resonated more powerfully with me.  I'm interested to see how that may or may not have shifted for me, in re-reading Flesh and Spirit and Breath and Bone three years later.  Looking forward to seeing what remains behind for me on this immersion into the world of the Danae and the Navronne.

This was also the first time that I really loved the cover art for Carol's books.  The artwork moved away from standard fantasy art fare to something much more evocative and ethereal which really suited the stories.  

The cover artist is Luis Roya.

And here is the first excerpt from Light and Dust.  I have read it and am happy to report that it has set my expectations high that I will love Sanctuary in the same way I loved the Lighthouse.